Infinite Fall (poem)

Infinite Fall

When a right hand chooses wrong

Just this

Tick of the clock packed in dry ice

Your trigger finger hangs, a tic decides

What you’ve done, agreeing with advice

What you were a minute past

Just that

What you are carved on your headstone

Name, digitoria of birth and death

Nothing further known

Far more years reduced to jothood, iotadom

Than present to complain they’ve got you wrong

Birds lay on

A streak of yellow-brown the suffocating sloth

Makes graphic the day’s intake of breath

Much of what you’d meant to do was good

The car won’t turn around you beg your phone to plead

The thermostat decides a few degrees

Less or more won’t kill you, parasite

Things that live outside the glass are savage

Savage skewances with recrudescing skills

Ear-flaps down, egg-tooth grown unicornian

Bones to thrumming, scrambling waves

And so they can’t be stopped

We tunnel from our cage to reach a landfill

Weave ourselves chainmail from plastic rings

Infinite Fall

The Answer Is No Answer

(2018, Stephanie Foster)